COMMENTARY: Sports jerk just insulting stereotype

— Men are brainless jerks, and if they’re sports fans, or sports competitors, they generally take their jerkiness to what they like to call, in their endlessly trite way, “another level,” as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve watched television lately or been to a movie. That’s the insulting stereotype. That’s popular culture’s image of the modern sports fan or competitor.

It’s flapdoodle, of course, and it’s insulting. It’s also unfair to intellectual sports fans such as George Will and to highly intelligent athletes such as Jeremy Lin and Myron Rolle, and to exemplars of integrity and decorum such as Jim Tressel, Joe Paterno, Tony Dungy and ... well, the list would be long, and that’s the point. The stereotypical sports jerk is an insult to the memory of the great John Wooden.

But you can’t miss him, this modern sports jerk. He’s everywhere: in movies, comic strips, television shows and especially commercials, such as one shown popularly during the Super Bowl. Dressed in his team’s jersey, the sports jerk is just about to leave the house for a softball game when he notices that his wife,or girlfriend, has iced down a case of his favorite beer. But the beer, oddly enough, is for her book club, which will soon be meeting right there at the house.

“I love book club,” the jerky sports fan says, taking a beer. He remains for the meeting, although actually for the beer, of course. “Awesome,” he exclaims, rapturously.

Settled in, he invites others from the softball team to join the book club meeting. And they soon make it clear that they’ve rarely, if ever, opened a book, except perhaps of the comic or match variety.

“Do you like Little Women?” one of the book club members asks one of the beer-plundering sports jerks, referring, of course, to Louisa May Alcott’s classic.

“I’m not too picky,” the sports jerk says, thoughtfully, as if considering the possibilities.

And so the women are polite, sensitive, courteous and smart. They love books. The men are boorish, duplicitous, crude and dumb. They love sports.

This depiction of the sports fan as an insufferable jerk wouldn’t be offensive if it weren’t so relentless and consistent. Have you seen an intellectual or polite or sensitive sportsfan in a film lately or on TV?

Probably not. You’re more likely to find anybody connected with sports portrayed as if he’s intellectually and emotionally stunted, a man-boy, a perpetual adolescent who makes jokes about butts and passing gas or maybe exploding snakes.

In an ESPN commercial, for example, Stuart Scott, one of the channel’s anchors, gives tennis star Maria Sharapova what looks like a can of tennis balls, but actually the can is filled with springy snakes that have been compressed and are ready to explode into her face when she releases them. And she does, and Scott laughs, and another sports jerk perpetuates the stereotype.

And sports jerks think about little else, even when driving. In another commercial, two 18-wheelers race down the expressway, their drivers impersonating their favorite NASCAR rowdies, Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski, who were recently involved in a scrape, as in boys being boys being sports jerks. A sports jerk “whose girlfriend has removed his spine” might need a portable television to watch the game he’s missing while shopping, according to another commercial, but generally sports jerks do nothing but watchand think about sports.

That’s why popular culture’s image of the sports jerk is so insulting, especially to somebody like Lin. The 6-3 guard on the Dallas Mavericks summer team went to Harvard. He was so impressive in the summer league, averaging 9.8 points, that other teams showed interest in him. He agreed to a contract with Golden State on Tuesday.

Rolle, a defensive back at Florida State, finished his undergraduate degree in 2 1 /2 years. He could have entered the NFL Draft in 2009. Instead, he accepted a Rhodes scholarship. This year he was drafted in the sixth round.

Insulting, too, to Will, the esteemed political columnist for the Washington Post who’s a regular at Camden Yards in Baltimore, where he meticulously scores the Orioles’ games. Will has written two books on his favorite subject, baseball.

They defy the image of the sports jerk, as does every academic All-America team and the vast majority of sports fans and competitors everywhere, men and women alike. They’re the ones who make the stereotype so funny, so absurdly amusing precisely because it’s so incongruous with the reality.

Sports, Pages 20 on 07/24/2010

Upcoming Events